


La Vie En Rose

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-16
Updated: 2012-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 06:58:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan comes to Paris for Serena, but he stays for Blair. (Post season 3.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Vie En Rose

It takes Dan eleven days to sort out the Georgina situation and follow Serena and Blair to Paris. That's exactly six days longer than it takes Serena to hook up with a young French musician named Pascal, who plays soulful ballads on his guitar, looks like he walked out of an Armani advert, and is the offspring of some influential politician. He's just the kind of guy Dan tries not to compare himself to because the outcome would inevitably be depressing.

Serena seems genuinely excited, if somewhat confused, to see Dan. "But what are you _doing_ here?" she asks, after introducing him as "my friend Dan, from back home" to Pascal. 

There are a dozen answers to her question, all of which amount to one simple truth: Dan is here for Serena. Except Serena is holding Pascal's hand, and she looks happy and carefree and in love, a world – or at least an ocean – away from the girl who used to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders. The truth, Dan realizes, won't do much good here; it will only make the situation awkward and embarrassing for everyone involved. 

He tries to put on a smile that looks vaguely sincere and says, "I thought it would be good to get away for a bit, after everything. And, you know, Paris seemed the perfect place to start. There's so much history and culture. I might get some inspiration out of it. I thought I might as well catch up with you guys while you were here."

He knows he's rambling, but Serena doesn't seem to notice that something's amiss. Perhaps she thinks that he really is the kind of person who'd travel halfway around the world to _seek inspiration_. Perhaps he should be that kind of person.

But when Serena and Pascal walk off to attend some kind of _vernissage_ , Blair turns to him with a raised eyebrow and says, "My God, Humphrey, don't tell me you came all the way to Paris because you're in love with Serena and wanted to convince her to start over."

"Um. No, I didn't," Dan lies, but it doesn't matter because Blair goes on as if he hadn't said a thing.

"And of course you didn't think to call beforehand. Because if you had, you would have heard all about her pretty French _beau-du-jour_ and how much she _adores_ him, and you wouldn't have had to go through the trouble of coming here and making a fool out of yourself. Really, Humphrey, that's so—"

"Pathetic, I know," Dan interrupts her. "I don't need you to tell me that."

Blair blinks. "I was going to say romantic, but pathetic works too."

He hears the wistful edge in her voice, but bites his tongue and swallows the question if she wishes that it was Chuck coming up with this sort of romantic gesture. He doesn't want to talk about Chuck and, he's sure, neither does Blair.

"So, where's your pretty French _beau-du-jour_ , then?" 

"Oh, please! Like I'd lower my standards enough to hook up with random Europeans." She spits the word as if it's an insult, but it sounds as fake as Dan's explanation for his Paris trip earlier. If Blair isn't throwing herself into a whirlwind romance, most likely she has other reasons than an irrational aversion to the people here. "No, I think I'll content myself spending my vacation with shopping sprees, extended stays in the hotel spa and the odd tourist thing."

"I think the odd tourist thing is going to be on my schedule as well," Dan says.

"You mean now that your schedule has been freed from all Serena-related activity? Like romantic dinners for two and midnight strolls by the Seine and making sweet love in the moonlight?" Blair offers him a fake sugar-sweet smile to drive the barb home, and right in that moment, Dan really does hate her and wishes he had an equally cutting reply about the sad decline of her own relationship ready. But he can't come up with anything clever and poignant fast enough, and the opportunity passes.

"Oh well," Blair continues with a dramatic sigh. "You probably did plenty of research about all the places a tourist would want to visit. I suppose you'll make a decent guide."

* * *

It takes Dan a day to figure out that she meant he'd make a decent tourist guide _for her_. 

He really doesn't know any more about Paris than the guide book he bought at JFK told him. But Blair never even so much as looked into a guide book. All of her Paris knowledge comes from movies she's seen. She'll point out the exact place where Audrey Hepburn danced with Fred Astaire in "Funny Face" or the café where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy sat in "Before Sunset", while Dan will tell her about all the artists and the writers and the history of Montmartre. He thinks she's going to get bored soon – not that he's actively trying to be boring, he just doesn't think this kind of trivia will hold her interest for long – but she doesn't rush off to dive into the next Chanel store, so maybe he's not doing that badly. 

Dan stays in a small, comfortable bed and breakfast near Centre Pompidou, while Blair has a suite at the Four Seasons that she technically shares with Serena, whom neither of them have seen for more than five minutes in a week or so. 

"I wish she'd take her luggage with her," Blair says, a little resentfully, and kicks a dress out of the way. "Let Pascal trip over random items of clothing instead of me." 

Dan can't blame her for her bitterness. After all, she came to Paris to spend some quality time with her best friend, and then said friend took off with a stranger, leaving Dan to take her place as Blair's travel companion. It's probably not how Blair had imagined this vacation would go.

They don't talk a lot about Serena. Just once, after Serena made one of her blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances in the hotel lobby, Pascal following her like a lovesick puppy, Blair looks at Dan and says, "Aren't you going to do something about it?"

"Like what? Demand a duel, pistols at dawn? I'm not sure Serena would appreciate the gesture. And Pascal would probably shoot me before I could even figure out how to release the safety catch." He tries to make a joke out of it, even if the joke's on him, but Blair will have none of it.

"Don't be ridiculous, Humphrey. But really, you came all the way to Paris for her and now you're just going to _give up_?"

Dan can tell from the hardness in her voice and the way she glares at him that the idea bothers her, possibly more than it bothers him. He shrugs. "Serena seems to have decided that we're best off as friends, and maybe she's right. I'd rather be the guy she comes to when she needs a shoulder to cry on over the latest break-up with some boyfriend than be the boyfriend she broke up with. And eventually, that's how it always ends with her."

It's the wrong thing to say, because there's suddenly a storm brewing on Blair's face, and he can hear a rant coming on how he has no right to judge her best friend. Before she can jump to Serena's defense, he quickly adds, "I don't mean that in a bad way. But Serena is always going to need her freedom. If you tie her down, you'll just make her run. And if she stays, she's going to be unhappy. And I don't want to make her unhappy."

Funny how it took a trip across the ocean for him to realize that when he should have known it a long time ago. 

At some point during his last words, the anger has drained from Blair's features. She looks a little sad now, even when she offers him a faint smile. "Only you would make _not_ fighting for the woman you love sound like the _romantic_ thing to do."

He's pretty sure she means it as an insult. It doesn't sound like one.

* * *

He kisses Blair on the Eiffel Tower. The wind is tousling her hair while she smiles and points at something or the other down on the ground, and on the horizon, the sun is almost setting, turning the sky faintly orange. It's a ridiculously romantic setting, and he just can't help but cup her face in his hands, tilt her head up and press their lips together. He knows it's a mistake the moment his mouth touches hers, maybe even before that, but it's an impulse he can't stop himself from giving in to.

Blair breaks away, looking outraged. "What _the hell_ was that, Humphrey?"

Dan sighs, steeling himself for her anger at his presumptuousness. "We're in Paris. On the Eiffel Tower. There's a sunset," he points out foolishly.

"And that's why you think you can just _kiss me_? What kind of a—"

"No, that's not why," he interrupts her. He can feel the eyes of what feels like a hundred tourists around them on him, all of which have witnessed the ill-advised kiss and her outburst, and now they seem to be waiting to see how this little scene will turn out. Squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, he pinches the bridge of his nose hard and tries to come up with a way to put his reasons into words that won't have Blair try and push him from the platform. Being thrown from the Eiffel Tower is not quite how he wanted his trip to end. 

"I've kissed you because we spent two weeks in Paris together and I thought this would be the most horrible vacation ever, but I ended up enjoying every minute of it, and because you keep quoting lines from movies I've never seen and never wanted to see but wouldn't mind watching with you, and because you think I'm romantic even when I'm being a pathetic idiot, and because we're in Paris, on the Eiffel Tower, at sunset, and I realized that I should want to be here with Serena, but I don't. I'm glad that it's you I'm here with, and I just wanted to kiss you. That's why I did it." It all comes out in a rush and he winces when he hears himself. He's a writer; he should be more eloquent than this.

"Oh," Blair says. She looks a little shell-shocked, and Dan's not sure if that's a good or a bad sign.

"I'm sorry, okay. I didn't mean to presume that you would—"

Before he can finish his apology, Blair finds her tongue again, cutting him short. "Shut up, Humphrey."

And then her hand is in his hair, pulling him down, and she's kissing him again, a little too hard and a little too desperate, and he never wants her to stop. 

Somewhere close to them, someone applauds. 

"I hate tourists," Blair whispers against his mouth, in between kisses, but she sounds a little amused and Dan knows she's secretly thrilled to star in her own romance movie and have a captive audience. He can't say he's entirely opposed to the idea himself.

* * *

They leave a trail of clothes from the door of the hotel suite to the bed. That's how Serena finds them the next morning, naked and wrapped around one another, still half-asleep when Serena starts yelling at them.

Then Blair yells back that she can sleep with whoever she wants to and apropos, where's Serena's little French boy-toy? Dan mostly tries to act like he's not there, which works reasonably well until Serena turns to him and tells him she's disappointed in him. He's not entirely sure what that means. In fact, he thinks not even Serena is probably sure what she means.

She leaves in a huff, taking most of her stuff with her. Blair sinks back into the mattress, dropping her arm dramatically over her face. "That was absolutely horrible! Make it up to me, Humphrey."

Dan refrains from pointing out that it was hardly _his_ fault and complies, even though it turns out that "make it up to me" was not so much a thinly veiled demand for sex but rather meant that he should take her out for a hideously expensive breakfast and then spend endless hours shopping on the Champs-Elysées, carrying a million bags for her.

* * *

 _What happens in Paris, stays in Paris_ , they decide. Or rather, Blair decides and Dan agrees, because it makes sense. It's not like they'd work out in the real world, where she's snobby, sharp-tongued Queen B and he's boring, unfashionable Lonely Boy. He hardly sees her at all anymore now that she's at Columbia, and it's not like they've ever had that many things in common in the first place.

He hangs out with Vanessa, who's forgiven him and agrees that they're better off as friends, and watches obscure foreign language art movies with her. When he suggests they should try something else, like "Breakfast at Tiffany's", she gives him an odd look but eventually agrees. It takes just about ten minutes for him to realize that he has no interest whatsoever in watching this with her, or with anyone but Blair.

He starts writing a short story about a man who falls in love in Paris, but deletes it on page six because it's clichéd and stupid and he wasn't _in love_ , and anyway, there are no rewrites in real life.

* * *

Family breakfast at the Humphrey-van-der-Woodsen household is a bit subdued and weird since Jenny's gone. It's odd that her absence should have that kind of effect, seeing as she wasn't around much lately to begin with, but they all miss her so much now that they're starting to forget how miserable she used to make them. Or maybe it was the other way around; Dan's not quite sure anymore.

Serena corners him afterwards, when he's just about to slink out quietly and meet up with Nate. 

"Dan, wait. We need to talk," she says, sounding ominous. Between her expression and her tone, Dan can tell that he doesn't want to have this conversation. He tries to come up with an excuse to hurry off, but it's Serena, and Serena will always inevitably have her way.

"Alright," he sighs, and lets her lead him into her room.

She doesn't say anything for a moment that seems to stretch endlessly. He's about to ask her if she changed her mind about wanting to talk, but then she says, "In Paris—" and Dan shuts his mouth and wishes he were anywhere but here.

He expects some sort of apology for her outburst over walking in on him and Blair, or an awkward rehash of her relationship with Pascal, maybe even a big, awful confession of something or the other that's happened during her vacation. 

What he doesn't expect is for her to say, "I knew that you came for me, that you thought you and me were... headed somewhere after we kissed and I broke up with Nate. And I was glad when you pretended that this wasn't why you'd follow us. Actually, I was _grateful_ that you didn't make some grand gesture. It wouldn't have changed anything, and… things would have been awkward between us."

She pauses. 

"Okay," he says tentatively, confused. He has no idea where this is going. He's not sure he likes where this could be going.

Serena smiles a little and he can't help but think that he seems to be missing something. 

"But Blair's not me, Dan," Serena says. "Blair _wants_ grand gestures. She wants someone to fight for her."

And... _oh!_

* * *

But Dan's not Chuck – he doesn't really do grand gestures, like heart-wrenching deadlines to meet on top of the Empire State Building. Besides, he already kissed Blair on the Eiffel Tower, at sunset. As far as grand romantic gestures go, you can't really top that. So he doesn't even try.

Instead, he sends a text message: _Do you have any plans for tomorrow night?_

There's the customary two-hour I-do-have-better-things-to-do-than-reply-to-your-texts wait before Blair answers with a terse. _There's a party I'm thinking of going to. And no, you can't come. Why?_

Dan smiles, because the 'why' at the end makes it sound a lot less like a rebuke, and he knows an opening when he seems one. 

_I thought maybe we could watch Breakfast at Tiffany's together._

The reply doesn't come until much later that night. _I suppose I could always go to the party afterwards. My dorm room, 7pm. Don't be late or I'll be gone._

* * *

Dan isn't late. Blair never goes to that party.

* * *

End.


End file.
